Category: Books

Gladwell and Surowiecki discuss their respective books in Slate.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed came out this weekend.

In essence Diamond’s book consists of two parts.  The first and lengthiest part (416 of 525 text pages) examines how several past societies — including the Mayans and Easter Island — met their doom.  In every studied case deforestation and soil erosion played important roles.  This part of the book could have been published on a stand-alone basis with the title How Poor and Backward Societies Suffer From Deforestation and Ill-Defined Property Rights.  Specialists might carp that the material relies on secondary sources, but I found it to be stimulating and informative throughout.

The second part of the book is brief, and details major environmental problems faced today.  This includes overpopulation, vanishing energy supplies, the loss of biodiversity, and so on.  The material was well-presented but the overall level was not much above what you would find in a good magazine article.

The key to the "meta-book" is Diamond’s claim that part one — the history of deforestation — means we should worry more about part two, namely current environmental problems.  The meta-book fails.

Yes we should worry about the environment today, but largely because of current data and analysis, not because of past history.  If you look at the past, the single overwhelming fact is that all previous environmental problems, at the highest macro level, were overcome.  We moved from the squalor of year 1000 to the mixed but impressive successes of 2005, a huge step forward.  Environmental problems, however severe, did not prevent this progress.  We may not arrive in 3005 with equal ease, but if you are a pessimist you should be concerned with the uniqueness of the contemporary world, not its similarities to the past.

Today’s world is indeed different.  We are much wealthier, we have (partially) responsive democratic governments, reasonably effective government regulations, much higher population, an astonishing command over science, we are globally connected, and of course we use resources at a much higher clip.  Whether you are an optimist or pessimist about modernity, the history of Greenland or the Pitcairn Islands should not much revise your priors about our future.

Here is Diamond’s recent NYT Op-Ed; Cafe Hayek has a negative reaction.  Here is a quasi-review of the book from Matt Yglesias.  Here is Alex on a fishy fact in the book.  Here is my previous post on the book, which links to an interview with Diamond and a Malcolm Gladwell review.

The claim in the book I would most like to bet against:

"In the long run it is doubtful that Australia can even support its present population: the best estimate of a population sustainable at the present standard of living is 8 million people, less than half of the present population." 

Any takers?

Read more here, and good luck to Larry Lessig, I am cautiously bullish about this experiment.  Wikis cannot always be trusted; what I like best is that the continual back-and-forth tends to keep the links fresh.  They are complements to other sources, not substitutes.

Garry Kasparov – Garry Kasparov on Fischer, My Great Predecessors, volume 4 – Fascinating, just imagine if Beethoven had written a book on Mozart.  Most of the page is chess games, but the remaining text is alone worth the price.  Kasparov makes a convincing case that Fischer relied heavily on his opponent’s major blunders, and that he would have a hard time beating many of the best post-1972 players.  Can a subsequent champion make such an argument and keep a gracious tone?  That is just part of what makes the book so interesting.  Here is one review, including an interview.

Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton – I’ve reached the point where I hate books on the Founding Fathers, and I vowed I would not touch this one.  But I weakened and it won me over.  It stands as one of the best biographies I have read, plus it is full of economic history.

Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo – He’s Just Not That Into You – Natasha reads me excerpts from this at night.  Recast in rational choice terms, the main point is that women suffer from weakness of will, and require exhortation to adopt higher standards.  They should split up with more guys, most of whom have no intention of marrying them. 

Is the postulated problem — namely excessively low female standards — well-suited for genetic fitness but not utility maximization?  Or was it well-suited for hunter-gatherer society but no longer today?  How elastic is the supply of quality manhood, in response to higher standards from females?  Must we revise the standard economic account that males will invest too much in signaling quality?

Gregory Conko and Gregory Miller – The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the BioTech Revolution – The title says it all, recommended.  Here is a summary interview.

Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson – Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior – Main point: animals are smarter and more sensitive than you think, most of them just happen to be autistic.  After you read the book, this suddenly seems intuitively obvious.  This book I could not put down, and note that one of the authors is herself autistic.

Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed is due out December 29th.  His main argument is that many past civilizations have declined due to ecological catastrophes, and that we underestimate similar risks today.  Here is an exclusive article by Diamond, which summarizes much of the book. 

His older Guns, Germs, and Steel is a modern classic on the rise of the West; I am also much enamored of his The Third Chimpanzee.  You’ll hear more on his latest once I get my hands on it, any Diamond book is an event.

Addendum: Blogger David Friedman points my attention to this Malcolm Gladwell review.  Read Matt Yglesias on the book as well.

Here is Richard Posner’s 2003-4 output.

Here is Richard Posner’s attitude toward socializing; I am glad someone has come out and put this view on the table.

The Economist and The New York Times (password required) have put out their "best books of the year" lists.  Each list is at the respective link, the common elements are:

Philip Roth – The Plot Against America

Anne Tyler – The Amateur Marriage

Colm Toibin – The Master

Alan Hollinghurst – Line of Beauty

David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas

Orhan Pamuk – Snow

Moving on to non-fiction, we have:

Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton

Seymour Hersh – Chain of Command

The 9-11 Commission Report, and

Stephen Greenblatt – Will in the World

As for my favorites in fiction, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is my clear pick, with nods to Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro.  For non-fiction, my memory summons up Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and Bart Schulz’s Henry Sidgwick: An Intellectual Biography.  For science I’ll nominate Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos.  I’m leaving off everything that has made our "Books we Recommend" list over the months.

My apologies if I forget your book.  No, I haven’t forgotten its content (yet), I simply have no idea whether it came out this last year.  Age has compressed my sense of time into two rather gross categories: "my plans for the future" and "the distant past."

Is it possible that near-universal affluence and the social safety net inevitably make for less moving fiction? This thought is suggested by  A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s heart-wrenching novel of India that invites comparison to the English novels of the 19th century–complete with a kind of workhouse in which our heroes are briefly incarcerated. Such is life in the developing world; fans of Sister Carrie should read "At 18, Min Finds a Path to Success in Migration Wave" at wsj.com (requires subscription), about the odyssey of one young woman from rural China.

Mistry’s book is set around 1975, with periodic excursions into the deeper past, and gives us a portrait of a place (India during the suspension of civil liberties under Indira Gandhi) where affluence is rare and the social safety net almost non-existent. It’s a society where the dead hand of bad government blights almost everything: there is rent control, food rationing, and a bureaucracy so extensive that "facilitators" negotiate it for you for a fee. Corruption abounds, abetted by all the regulation.

In literary terms, it’s too bad modern Western novels aren’t much concerned with money nowadays (you can read more about this), but to the extent the phenomenon reflects reader prosperity it’s probably just as well. Read A Fine Balance and you’ll come away feeling that the characters in most Western novels-like the people in most Western societies-have no idea how good they have it.